


send your wish up with the lanterns

by postfixrevolution



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Hoshidan festivals and wishing lanterns and thIS IS SO CHEESY, M/M, Post-Birthright, Pre-Relationship, mentions of canonical character death but tbh it's really vague/subtle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-06
Updated: 2016-07-06
Packaged: 2018-07-21 21:04:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7404619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postfixrevolution/pseuds/postfixrevolution
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A prince and a soon-to-be-king have a conversation about other universes and the proper way to make a wish. Not necessarily in that order.<br/> </p><p>or: Leo and Camilla stay a bit later after Ryoma's coronation festival.</p>
            </blockquote>





	send your wish up with the lanterns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hikariix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hikariix/gifts).



> For the beautiful and super sweet [hikariix](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hikariix/pseuds/hikariix), whom I was lucky enough to meet at AX this year! I hope I did your favorite ship justice, heh~
> 
> Unbeta-ed, so firgive any little mistakes that may lurk, and enjoy! ^u^

Takumi sits fiddling with a flint and a lantern on the opposite end of the lake when he hears the footsteps behind him. The battles are long over, have been over for weeks now, but he still tenses, repositions the flint in his hands as he might a blade, and waits. The footsteps stop behind him, and just as he is prepared to turn around, the voice that flows silkily down from above him stops him cold.

"What's that you're doing?" Leo asks. Takumi turns around and is met with cobalt cloth and ebony armor. The moonlight is bright and beautiful, drenching them in enough light to make the boy's armor seem less harsh, to make his blond hair glint silver and to accentuate the unadulterated curiosity that shines in his earthen eyes.

"Prince Leo," Takumi greets politely.

Leo tilts his head in greeting. "Prince Takumi,” he responds likewise.

“What are you doing so far from the festivities? Surely your family would want you with them.”

Takumi shrugs, returning to his flint. “They can manage without me for a bit. It’s too loud in the main plaza.”

“Something you and I can agree on, then,” Leo replies. Takumi cranes his neck to see Leo sit down beside him, knees pulled up to his chest but sat upon the dirt nonetheless. It’s odd, seeing the Nohrian prince on anything besides his intimidatingly armored horse, but Takumi remains silent, allowing the other boy to sit beside him, sharp eyes fixed on his hands as he tries again to light the small candle attached to his lantern.

“It’ll quiet down eventually,” he tells him absently. “Everyone is usually quiet when they fly up the lanterns.”

“Is that the contraption you’re messing with now?” the blond asks. “A lantern? That small candle hardly looks large enough to provide any useful amount of light.”   
Takumi snorts, unable to help the laugh that escapes him.

“It’s not supposed to provide light,” he explains, taking his eyes off the lantern for a moment, just to meet Leo’s. He stares at the contraption scrutinizingly, thin lips set into a frown, and the expression is just enough to bring an amused smile to Takumi’s lips. “Seeing as it’s my brother’s coronation, they’re going to be flown up with well wishes for his reign. But often times, people just send them up with wishes of their own.”

“A wishing lantern,” Leo mutters contemplatively. “How quaint. We would make our wishes on shooting stars in Nohr.”

“Shooting stars?” Takumi echoes. “Why would you wish on something that’s falling from the sky?”

Leo shrugs. “Perhaps for the same reason you send yours up with the lanterns,” he says vaguely, turning his gaze toward the town across the lake. The first lanterns are already being sent off over there, floating airily up into the night sky and reflecting across the water’s surface like stars. “To us here on the ground, anything that touches the heavens, even for a moment, is more capable of miracles than we ever will be.”

Takumi nods, striking the flint again. It sparks, catching the wick of the candle aflame, and he watches it flicker for a moment before rising to his feet, taking the lantern with him. He senses curious eyes on him, and with a wicked smile, he offers his free hand to Leo.

“Are you just going to sit there uselessly, Prince Leo, or are you going to give me a hand with this?” he quips lightly. “I’m feeling generous, so maybe I can show your uneducated self how to properly make a wish.”

A scoff puffs past Leo’s lips, but he takes Takumi’s hand nonetheless, rising to his feet and eyeing him expectantly.

“Very well, show me how Nohr’s newest allies make their paper lantern wishes,” he replies.

With a nod, Takumi steps to the side, offering him the base of the lantern and telling him exactly how to hold it as the paper shell slowly begins to fill with hot air. Leo’s hands are unexpectedly warm, he thinks absently, slender and uncalloused; he knows that his own hands, worn from years of training with a blade and bow alike, have the scars and callouses to prove it, but Leo’s are those of a mage, smooth and humming with heat and energy just beneath their skin, every opposite of the harsh and cold image he had held of the Nohrian prince before.

“Just hold onto it until you feel it start to float,” Takumi says. “And then we’ll let it go.”

“And I take it you make a wish then?”

Takumi nods, tapping the base of the lantern experimentally. It hovers gently above his fingertips, and with a gentle prod at the back of Leo’s knuckles, they lift the lantern up into the air and send it flying up into the night sky. Leo stares up at it, follows the small glowing form with awed eyes.

“For peace,” Leo mutters, watches as the lantern is carries up to the hundred that fill the sky alongside it. “May King Ryoma be prosperous in his rule, and may Hoshido and Nohr forever be good allies.”

Tawny eyes turn toward the blonde, looks at him as he stares skyward, at a inky canvas filled with star-like lanterns and lantern-like stars both.

“Good allies,” he echoes softly. "In another universe, we could have made good allies," Takumi muses, laughing shortly. Leo turns to face him at that. "Me with my bow,” he elaborates. “And you with your tome."

The blond exhales a soft laugh. "I suppose you're right," he says. Takumi can see the way he contemplates it in the look of his eyes - the same faraway, yet alert liveliness that he sees in his sister, too. "I would take care of those too close within your range, and I'd trust an archer's eye over anyone else's to have my back."

Takumi glances at him, locks his hazel eyes onto earthen ones, sharp and knowing, but with a heaviness clearly evident in the dark circles beneath them, painted there by war and loss and never to be washed off by the crown that he's soon to wear.

Leo's eyes are deep, struggle upon story upon tragedy etched into their depths. They're so utterly human - the same as his own, as any other Hoshidan he has known, despite the Nohrian blood that flows strongly in his veins - and for a moment, Takumi doesn't see the future king of Nohr. Before him sits a boy who has known loss in a way the archer never will, with blood on his hands, Hoshidan and Nohrian alike, and siblings kidnapped to a land there's no returning from. His eyes should reflect the very same amount of years that he sees in his own reflection, but the heaviness in then has seen millennia in bloodshed and death. The title of future king is less of a title when attributed to Leo, and more like an ode to the childhood that he no longer has the chance to have, and Takumi is found with a sudden urge to fix that, to chip away at the burden that weighs down earthen eyes and pull them from the unforgiving dirt so that they might see the sun.

“We’d have been unstoppable,” Takumi tells him resolutely. Leo stares at him wordlessly for a moment, earthen eyes blinking owlishly at the grey-haired boy, but Takumi just offers him a soft laugh, sitting himself back down on the lake’s shore beneath them. Leo turns his gaze back toward the lanterns - slowly flickering out as they reach the precipice of their climb.

“Yes,” Leo breathes eventually, a soft mutter, but audible against the quiet that surrounds them nonetheless. “Unstoppable.”

He looks away from the lanterns just as the last one flickers out, and when their eyes lock, there is a small smile pulling up at his lips, just enough to lighten the heaviness that Takumi has seen in his eyes. The way the silver moonlight silhouettes him in that moment is dizzying, and Takumi wonders if his eyes were playing tricks on him or if he’d really seen the flash of a shooting star overhead.


End file.
